Cyberinfrastructure Seminar Series

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

The National Virtual Observatory and Big Computing in Astronomy
Matthew Graham and Roy Williams, Caltech CACR
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM (PDT)
1:00 PM - 2:30 PM (CDT)
5239 Beckman Institute (NCSA) via AG

Astronomy faces an avalanche of data, both in terms of quantity and diversity. Increasingly, scientific knowledge is not directly visible on the photographic plate as in earlier times, but is extracted from digital data. Some have even said that the software is more important than the telescope. The National Virtual Observatory (NVO) is a five-year effort to unify astronomical data archives that allows them to be discovered, then utilized and combined at a rich semantic level.

Applications are already appearing that can make large requirements of these services. The NVO has a desperate need to scale up the service fabric: not just because the number of users is growing quickly, but because some of these users are using the services in new and powerful ways. The Palomar-Quest sky survey produces fifty gigabytes of data each clear night, and newer surveys will be coming online in the next few years that are expected to raise this to tens of terabytes per night.

This lecture will summarize the NVO cyberinfrastructure and then discuss current science drivers and technologies that involve big data computing.

The Cyberinfrastructure Seminar Series is a set of presentations on cyberinfrastructure and related research organized by NCSA and SDSC. These seminars are available on site at the presenting institution and remotely via the Access Grid. For more details regarding the AG venue for this seminar, please refer to: http://agschedule.ncsa.uiuc.edu/meetingdetails.asp?MID=9530. All Access Grid sites are welcome to participate in this seminar. If you have any questions, contact Jennie File, NCSA Training & Outreach Group.